Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
13-15 & 20-22 April 2012
Empire Polo Club, California, USA
coachella.com

In a sentence
With two identical line ups on consecutive weeks, Coachella boasts what is probably the strongest overall line up in the world.

Headliners
The Black Keys
Radiohead
Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg

If you only see one band
This could have been anybody of dozens, but ignoring the headliners, I wouldn’t want to miss The Shins.

Hidden down the order
It shows the strength of the line up that Gaslamp Killer looks like he’ll be on very early on the final day.

Other sockformation favourites
Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, M83, GIRLS, The Horrors, Frank Ocean, SebastiAn, Yuck, Neon Indian, WU LYF, The Dear Hunter, Miike Snow, Jeff Mangum, Feist, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, SBTRKT, Flying Lotus, Azealia Banks, A$AP Rocky, Buzzcocks, tUnE, yArDs, Black Lips, The Big Pink, Justice, Beirut, The Weeknd, Girl Talk, The Hives, DJ Shadow, Wild Flag, Modeselektor, Real Estate, First Aid Kit, Metronomy, Wild Beasts

it should come as no surprise that this month’s playlist is a bit of an amy winehouse special. i wasn’t blogging very regularly last weekend so didn’t really mention her on here. enough has been said anyway, so it isn’t really worth saying much apart from how much she’ll be missed. especially her music. as it happens, i’m in the camp addiction is a disease and it doesn’t matter how what the situation around her life was, she was a young girl who lost her life. and that’s bad. just in case you haven’t read it by the way, russell brand wrote an amazing piece about her.

these playlists aren’t just about what i’ve written about on here, but also what i’ve been listening to in the background. as most new bits of music i like get included on the blog, the extras are often older stuff. this month i’ve broken out crazysexycool for a bit of tlc love. i had to include them on here. also on an rnb feel you’ll find some cassie. a few days ago i had her playing on youtube (she’s hot, so it’s always video rather than mp3 with her) and accidentally started ‘rudie can’t fail’ by the clash on itunes. suffice to say that the two mixed together brilliantly and i now rate myself as the next carl cox.

enjoy the playlist, which can be found here and any feedback (especially tlc love) is always appreciated. also a quick thank you to emma who chose the amy winehouse connected songs to close the set.

that’s a pretty, pretty picture

let’s face it, no decade is ever going to match up to the nineties is it? i was at secondary school from 1990 to 1997, so the time is always going to be a special one to me. i remember starting my formative years at southend high school for boys listening to hip hop on the smaller field. 2 live crew‘s ‘me so horny’ was surely the song to year 7 (that’s the first year of secondary school people from countries other than england), along with the soundtrack to kid n’ play masterpiece, house party. how did that film not win any oscars?

it wasn’t for a couple of years that my true gangsta rap love would begin though. and it was all thanks to a group from queens with bald heads and a mad face logo. the onyx graphic adorned my art folder for many a year. rather embarrassingly i remember asking my mother for ‘bacdafucup’ for christmas, but didn’t want to say the f word to her (those days have long gone by the way), so asked if i could get an album called ‘back daf you cup’. she fell for it, right up until the point when the shop assistant told her what it was really called.

it wasn’t all guns and bitches for me though. my first cd album was ‘the prodigy experience’ and i still rate that as their best work. quite possibly for nostalgic reasons. along with mixtapes from slipmat and the rest of the ravers. elsewhere, i wasn’t totally sold on britpop and had yet to appreciate the genius of pulp, but knew i liked blur from the outset. i touched on grunge, with my bootleg copy of ‘nevermind’ a constant on my walkmen, but i regret missing out on the garage rock of pavement and their contemporaries at the time. like pulp, this was a band i would grow to love in the noughties.

there was plenty of embarrassment as well. for every ‘groove is in the heart’ or ‘dub be good to me’ there was a ‘tease me’ or a ‘i love your smile’. my embarrassing back story reaches a pinnacle with my second and third gigs though. my first has a very high cool factor, eric clapton at the albert hall, albeit with my parents. i soon undid all the good work though. in 1996/7 i started venturing out with my friends. if we weren’t visiting tots on the seafront, we’d be looking at where to go for live music. there were one or two in southend itself, but my two trips into the big city (or at least, the big city and then ilford) during this time are still a cringe moment for me. r kelly at wembley arena. i’ll leave you with that thought. true, it was before the ‘i believe i can fly’ doldrums, but what 16-year old boy goes to see r kelly? me. i would love to say that it all turned out okay because the crowd were 99% women and i was there for them, but i went to a boys school and had about as much luck with girls as you’d expect a chubby 16-year old from a boys school to have. looking back now, i can always harp on about the support act (notorious big. beat that) but let’s be fair – i went for mr kelly.

to ilford. i’m not going to go into detail but suffice to say that i witnessed a true soft soul pop phenonemen. the lighthouse family. serious. what was i thinking? not to worry though. if it hadn’t been for these two outtings what would i have been speaking about for the past two paragraphs?

somehow my praise of the nineties has turned into me trying to defend the gigs i went to. i’ll shut up, but don’t forget the nineties, and i’m not going to let you. you can now follow 90s sockformation for occasional tweets bringing the nineties straight back at you. to add to that, i also have a lovely collection of videos for you.

2 live crew. me so horny
kid n’ play. rap battle
onyx. slam
the prodigy. out of space
blur. there’s no other way
nirvana. lithium
beats international. dub be good to me
deee-lite. groove is in the heart
eric clapton. tears in heaven
r kelly. bump n grind
lighthouse family. ocean drive

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